WASHINGTON STATE

Boeing has fix for its Dreamliners Boeing will propose to regulators, perhaps this week, a short-term fix to bolster the 787 Dreamliner's defenses in case of battery fires like those that have kept the jet grounded the past month. The goal is to get the planes flying again, the Seattle Times reported, while Boeing works on a comprehensive redesign of the lithium-ion battery system that could take nine months or more to implement.

LOUISIANA

3rd man booked in Mardi Gras shooting New Orleans police say a third man has turned himself in to face charges from a shooting on Bourbon Street three days before Mardi Gras. Malcolm Hall, 19, was booked Saturday with four counts of attempted first-degree murder. The shooting injured four people, one seriously, during the run-up to Mardi Gras.

ECUADOR

Correa cruising to 3rd presidential term Rafael Correa celebrated his second re-election as Ecuador's president after the first official results showed him leading with 56.6 percent of the vote against 24 percent for his closest challenger. The results reflected more than half of the vote counted. Correa is a polemical left-wing economist who first was elected to the presidency in 2007.

NIGERIA

7 foreigners abducted in the north Gunmen attacked a construction company camp in rural northern Nigeria, killing a guard and kidnapping seven foreign workers from Britain, Greece, Italy, Lebanon and the Philippines, authorities, in the biggest kidnapping yet in a region under attack by Islamic extremists. One of those kidnapped was a woman. No group immediately claimed responsibility, though Nigeria's predominantly Muslim north has been under attack by the radical Islamic sect known as Boko Haram.

EGYPT

Demonstrations flare around Suez Canal Thousands of demonstrators shut down the administrative buildings of the Suez Canal terminal in Port Said, as part of a general strike protesting the death sentences handed down three weeks ago to 21 local soccer fans for their roles in a deadly riot last year. The protests marked the closest that the chaos in Egypt in the past two years has come to threatening the operations of the canal, an artery of shipping critical to international commerce and Egypt.

NEWS SERVICES